


Now You Don't

by spacetango



Series: A Shrine, Or Else a Scar [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, and letter writing, and then there was angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:39:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6750535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacetango/pseuds/spacetango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does the Dread Wolf do with his free time after Trespasser? Write Lavellan angsty letters he may or may not send, of course. Here's one of them.</p><p>Companion piece to chapter 4 of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3415478/chapters/7479878">Harel Shiral</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Now You Don't

Eyes like yours: wolves closing in for the kill. I imagined, once, the possibility of eyes like that, but those were dreams, pale shadows slinking at the edges of tangible things. I didn’t believe myself prey then; I don’t now. It’s just the absurdity of fate, a cosmic quirk, that part of me always twisted like a wounded halla whenever you looked my way.

Even in writing I must cocoon myself in metaphor. I must believe myself safe from you, vhenan, my bright and deadly flame I still despair to touch. Even now language is the illusion I conjure between us. Nothing can change, vhenan.

You change everything.

Do you remember Lydes? Your restless midnight pacing, steps precise with rage, and the not entirely selfless distraction I idly tossed your way. Consider that I, too, wearied of omissions and legerdemain. We only dared to touch each other as though we were afflicted. Symbolism, implication, doubt, but never the plain truth.

_Does she know? What does she know? She has to suspect. She suspects._

One moment always escapes memory’s shifting prison to intrude: you pushing aside for later the weight of inchoate understanding when Nightmare calls me harellan. That instant stretches from the finite past into the infinite permutations of the future, and in Lydes it digs into us like a poisoned thorn.

There’s a howl in your eyes as you begin to piece together the nature of the spell I chose as a distraction. Like calls to like. Wolves howl more often for the ones they love. And it is love.

In Lydes that night, under all those cold and hungry stars, it was: _tear me from myself, vhenan_ , I think, and you, as if you heard my thought, dart forward, the taut lines of your body a puzzle only I can unravel. You’re begging, in your own oblique way. You’re begging me to chase you.

Of course I do.

I chase.

I chase you, the voltaic tang of your perfume a trail in the constellation laden dark. It leads to you, the nape of your neck. Your left hand flexes as the spell’s magic nears, and we exchange teasing banter as if we don’t know what the mark’s reaction really means.

I lose myself in your anticipation, a taut vibration that says your focus is the hunter’s sights, and I, the quarry of your choice. I should know better than to take the bait you offer, but I ignore what I know. I’ll lick my wounds later. On we go about the spell, what it hides, what it means, how it works, your suspicions.

“Shall you ever be certain?” I ask you in my foolishness. Or maybe, I ask knowing you won’t resist the flank I’ve left exposed. Rend me. Don’t rend me. Your neck is oh so near; perhaps I’ll rend you.

“Perhaps I shan’t,” you say. “Banal nadas.”

There. Nightmare’s thorn, a weapon of my own design. Like any beast of prey, you love the taste of blood; like any beast of prey, I do too. Even if, sometimes, it’s my own. I imagine the grin you turn on me is bloodied. I imagine letting you feast. I’d leave all my selves behind for you if I could, I’d bury them and leave the flawed millennia behind. In this wasteland I wander you are the one, the only, guiding star, and that is not a path I can allow myself to follow.

In Lydes I thought I might: a vertigo of stars in the ceaseless indigo of sky, your face in my hands like I would never let you go, and the inevitable way I shatter against the animal sound you make when your mouth yields to mine.

Yield is misleading: your body alone yields. You are not gentle, no matter the precise calm you wear like royalty its privilege. I feel the roil underneath, the unrelenting hunger, like a vast unsettled sea battering down my cliffs, and I yearn to sink into your tides

From metaphor to metaphor to metaphor, because words have, in their specificity, an absence of essential meaning: the wolf disintegrates, and without it the man is helpless. Desperate. And desperate creatures always fight for their survival.

That is the essence of that kiss, and I believe you understand. Me fighting as a man, without the wolf’s cunning—that’s what unseats you. In Lydes, before Lydes, a long time after, we dance around you reaching for my secrets, your boundless ingenuity pitched against the obstacle of me, and now you see the naked, flesh bound creature underneath pointing the way inside my labyrinth. Do you follow? It’s madness, this impulsive invitation, and I am only saved because you falter.

You’d stagger back were you not clinging to me as savagely as I am to you. You never expected the constant assault of your curiosity to bear fruit here, not like this. You did not expect me to perish with desire. I ache to know what you envisioned, what you believed would come of your swift attacks and swifter disengaging feints. What is the pattern you imagine my blood making as your untested fangs hound my ancient heels? Because there is one. I know you like my own heart, and you have imagined it.

Vhenan, vhenan.

Your words: “That was— different.” As if my frenzied kiss was merely an unconsidered chess move, while your awful calm sweeps in to contain the disturbance I have wrought.

I say your name, but all you ask is for another kiss. A truce of sorts, this request. A promise you’ll relent for now, because your gates are as magnificent a ruin as my own, and you are not sure you want me to step through.

We speak, instead, of magic. My gift to you, the spell that cloaks us—a little bit of truth left out in the open yet unspoken. We will spend the night in conversation, a temporary lull, and we will let the future witness to the inevitable truth: you are as much a predator as I.


End file.
